Profile: Alex Jones

Alex Jones was a participant or observer in the following events:

Masthead of one of Ron Paul’s newsletters. [Source: Foundation for Rational Economics and Education]A number of newsletters released by Representative Ron Paul (R-TX), a self-described libertarian and strict Constitutionalist, contain what many believe to be racially objectionable remarks and claims. Paul’s monthly newsletters are published under a variety of names, including “Ron Paul’s Freedom Report,” “Ron Paul Political Report,” and “The Ron Paul Survival Report.” The newsletters are published by several organizations, including Paul’s non-profit group the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, and a group called Ron Paul & Associates. For a time, Ron Paul & Associates also publishes “The Ron Paul Investment Letter.” In 1996, a challenger for Paul’s House seat, Charles “Lefty” Morris (D-TX) makes public some of the racially inflammatory content in Paul’s newsletters. The newsletters will be publicly exposed in a 2008 article in the New Republic (see January 8-15, 2008). The content, culled from years of newsletters, includes such claims and observations as: From a 1992 newsletter: “[O]pinion polls consistently show only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty, and the end of welfare and affirmative action.” Politically “sensible” blacks are outnumbered “as decent people.” The same report claims that 85 percent of all black men in the District of Columbia have been arrested, and continues: “Given the inefficiencies of what DC laughingly calls the ‘criminal justice system,’ I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.… [W]e are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, [but] it is hardly irrational. Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings, and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers.” The same 1992 edition has Paul claiming that the government should lower the age at which accused juvenile criminals can be prosecuted as adults. “We don’t think a child of 13 should be held responsible as a man of 23,” the newsletter states. “That’s true for most people, but black males age 13 who have been raised on the streets and who have joined criminal gangs are as big, strong, tough, scary, and culpable as any adult and should be treated as such.” The newsletter also asserts that sophisticated crimes such as “complex embezzling” are conducted exclusively by non-blacks: “What else do we need to know about the political establishment than that it refuses to discuss the crimes that terrify Americans on grounds that doing so is racist? Why isn’t that true of complex embezzling, which is 100 percent white and Asian?” Another 1992 newsletter states, “[I]f you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be.” An undated newsletter excerpt states that US Representative Barbara Jordan (D-TX), who is African-American, is “the archetypical half-educated victimologist” whose “race and sex protect her from criticism.” The newsletters often use disparaging nicknames and descriptions for lawmakers. Jordan is called “Barbara Morondon.” Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton is a “black pinko.” Donna Shalala, the head of the Department of Health and Human Services during the Clinton administration, is a “short lesbian.” Ron Brown, the head of the Department of Commerce during the Clinton administration, is a “racial victimologist.” Roberta Achtenberg, the first openly gay public official confirmed by the US Senate, is a “far-left, normal-hating lesbian activist.” Newsletter items through the early 1990s attack Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., renaming him “X-Rated Martin Luther King” and labeling him a “world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours,” “seduced underage girls and boys,” and “made a pass at” fellow civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy. One newsletter ridicules black activists who wanted to rename New York City after King, suggesting that “Welfaria,” “Zooville,” “Rapetown,” “Dirtburg,” and “Lazyopolis” were better alternatives. The same year, King is described as “a comsymp [Communist sympathizer], if not an actual party member, and the man who replaced the evil of forced segregation with the evil of forced integration.” One 1990 excerpt says of the King holiday: “I voted against this outrage time and again as a congressman. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day!” An undated excerpt from a newsletter entry titled “Needlin’” says: “‘Needlin’,’ a new form of racial terrorism, has struck New York City streets on the tony Upper West Side. At least 39 white women have been stuck with used hypodermic needles—perhaps infected with AIDS—by gangs of black girls between the ages of 12 and 14. The New York Times didn’t find this fit to print for weeks and weeks, until its candidate David Dinkins [New York City’s first African-American mayor] was safely elected. Even then the story was very low key, with race mentioned many paragraphs into it. Who can doubt that if this situation were reversed, if white girls had done this to black women, we would have been subjected to months-long nationwide propaganda campaign on the evils of white America? The double standard strikes again.” The excerpt is presumably published sometime after 1989, when Dinkins is elected mayor of New York City. In 2011, NewsOne reporter Casey Gane-McCalla will write, “I could find no evidence of this ‘epidemic’ and the article seems to have no point other than to make white people scared of black people.” A December 1989 “special issue” of the Investment Letter addresses what it calls “racial terrorism,” and tells readers what to expect from the 1990s: “Racial Violence Will Fill Our Cities” because “mostly black welfare recipients will feel justified in stealing from mostly white ‘haves.’” In February 1990, another newsletter warns of “The Coming Race War.” In November 1990, an item advises readers: “If you live in a major city, and can leave, do so. If not, but you can have a rural retreat, for investment and refuge, buy it.” In June 1991, an entry on racial disturbances in Washington, DC’s Adams Morgan neighborhood is titled, “Animals Take Over the DC Zoo,” calling the disturbances “the first skirmish in the race war of the 1990s.” In June 1992, the Ron Paul Political Report publishes a “special issue” that explains the Los Angeles riots, claiming, “Order was only restored in LA when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began.” The looting, the newsletter writes, is a natural byproduct of government indulging the black community with “‘civil rights,’ quotas, mandated hiring preferences, set-asides for government contracts, gerrymandered voting districts, black bureaucracies, black mayors, black curricula in schools, black TV shows, black TV anchors, hate crime laws, and public humiliation for anyone who dares question the black agenda.” It also denounces “the media” for believing that “America’s number one need is an unlimited white checking account for underclass blacks.” The newsletter praises Asian merchants in Los Angeles for having the fortitude to resist political correctness and fight back. Koreans, the newsletter writes, are “the only people to act like real Americans” during the riots, “mainly because they have not yet been assimilated into our rotten liberal culture, which admonishes whites faced by raging blacks to lie back and think of England.” Another newsletter entry from around the same time strikes some of the same chords in writing about riots in Chicago after the NBA’s Chicago Bulls win the championship: “[B]lacks poured into the streets in celebration. How to celebrate? How else? They broke the windows of stores to loot, even breaking through protective steel shutters with crowbars to steal everything in sight.” The entry goes on to claim that black rioters burned down buildings all along Chicago’s “Magnificent Mile,” destroyed two taxicabs, “shot or otherwise injured 95 police officers,” killed five people including a liquor-store owner, and injured over 100 others. “Police arrested more than 1,000 blacks,” the newsletter claims. In 2011, Gane-McCalla will write that the newsletter entry falsely accuses blacks of perpetuating all of the violence, when in reality, the violence was perpetuated by people of all ethnicities. One thousand people—not 1,000 blacks—were arrested. And, he will write, “two officers suffered minor gunshot wounds and that 95 were injured in total, but the way Paul phrased it, it would seem most of the 95 officers injured were shot.” An undated newsletter entry says that “black talk radio” features “racial hatred [that] makes a KKK rally look tame. The blacks talk about their own racial superiority, how the whites have a conspiracy to wipe them out, and how they are going to take over the country and wipe them out. They only differ over whether they should use King’s non-violent approach (i.e. state violence) or use private violence.” An undated newsletter entry discusses “the newest threat to your life and limb, and your family—carjacking,” blaming it on blacks who follow “the hip-hop thing to do among the urban youth who play unsuspecting whites like pianos.” The entry advises potential carjacking victims to shoot carjackers, then “leave the scene immediately [and] dispos[e] of the wiped-off gun as soon as possible.” The entry concludes: “I frankly don’t know what to make of such advice, but even in my little town of Lake Jackson, Texas, I’ve urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self-defense. For the animals are coming.” (Bernstein 5/21/1996; Kirchick 1/8/2008; Gane-McCalla 5/6/2011) According to author and militia/white supremacist expert David Neiwert, much of Paul’s information about black crime comes from Jared Taylor, the leader of the American Renaissance movement (see January 23, 2005). Taylor, Neiwert will write, cloaks his racism in “pseudo-academic” terminology that is published both in a magazine, American Renaissance, and later in a book, The Color of Crime, both of which make what Neiwert calls “unsupportable claims about blacks.” (David Neiwert 6/8/2007) Conspiracies, Right-Wing Militias, and Bigotry - The newsletters often contain speculations and assertions regarding a number of what reporter James Kirchick will call “shopworn conspiracies.” Paul, as reflected in his newsletter, distrusts the “industrial-banking-political elite” and does not recognize the federally regulated monetary system and its use of paper currency. The newsletters often refer to to the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1978, a newsletter blames David Rockefeller, the Trilateral Commission, and “fascist-oriented, international banking and business interests” for the Panama Canal Treaty, which it calls “one of the saddest events in the history of the United States.” A 1988 newsletter cites a doctor who believes that AIDS was created in a World Health Organization laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland. In addition, Ron Paul & Associates sells a video about the Branch Davidian tragedy outside Waco (see April 19, 1993) produced by “patriotic Indiana lawyer Linda Thompson” (see April 3, 1993 and September 19, 1994), as a newsletter calls her, who insists that Waco was a conspiracy to kill ATF agents who had previously worked for President Clinton as bodyguards. Kirchick will note that outside of the newsletters, Paul is a frequent guest on radio shows hosted by Alex Jones, whom Kirchick will call “perhaps the most famous conspiracy theorist in America.” Connections to Neo-Confederate Institute - Kirchick goes on to note Paul’s deep ties with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank in Alabama founded by Paul’s former chief of staff, Lew Rockwell; Paul has taught seminars at the institute, serves as a “distinguished counselor,” and has published books through the institute. The von Mises Institute has a long history of support for white-supremacist neo-Confederate groups, including the League of the South, led by Confederate apologist Thomas Woods (see October 14, 2010). Paul will endorse books by Woods and other neo-Confederates. Paul seems to agree with members of the von Mises institute in their view that the Civil War was the beginning of a horrific federal tyranny that ran roughshod over states’ rights. Paul, in his newsletters and speeches, has frequently espoused the idea of states’ secession as protest against the federal government. Lamenting the South African Revolution - In March 1994, a newsletter warns of a “South African Holocaust,” presumably against white South Africans, once President Nelson Mandela takes office. Previous newsletters call the transition from a whites-only government to a majority-African government a “destruction of civilization” that is “the most tragic [to] ever occur on that continent, at least below the Sahara.” Praise for Ku Klux Klan Leader's Political Aspirations - In 1990, a newsletter item praises Louisiana’s David Duke, the former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, for coming in a strong second in that state’s Republican Senate primary. “Duke lost the election,” the newsletter says, “but he scared the blazes out of the Establishment.” In 1991, a newsletter asks, “Is David Duke’s new prominence, despite his losing the gubernatorial election, good for anti-big government forces?” The conclusion is that “our priority should be to take the anti-government, anti-tax, anti-crime, anti-welfare loafers, anti-race privilege, anti-foreign meddling message of Duke, and enclose it in a more consistent package of freedom.” Duke will in return give support to Paul’s 2008 presidential candidacy. Attacking Gays, AIDS Research - Paul’s newsletters often praise Paul’s “old colleague,” Representative William Dannemeyer (R-CA), a noted anti-gay activist who often advocates forcibly quarantining people suffering from AIDS. Paul’s newsletters praise Dannemeyer for “speak[ing] out fearlessly despite the organized power of the gay lobby.” In 1990, one newsletter mentions a reporter from a gay magazine “who certainly had an axe to grind, and that’s not easy with a limp wrist.” In an item titled, “The Pink House?” the newsletter complains about President George H.W. Bush’s decision to sign a hate crimes bill and invite “the heads of homosexual lobbying groups to the White House for the ceremony,” adding, “I miss the closet.” The same article states, “Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities.” If homosexuals are ever allowed to openly serve in the military, another newsletter item concludes, they, “if admitted, should be put in a special category and not allowed in close physical contact with heterosexuals.” One newsletter calls AIDS “a politically protected disease thanks to payola and the influence of the homosexual lobby,” and alternates between praising anti-gay rhetoric and accusing gays of using the disease to further their own political agenda. One item tells readers not to get blood transfusions because gays are trying to “poison the blood supply.” Another cites a far-right Christian publication that advocates not allowing “the AIDS patient” to eat in restaurants, and echoes the false claim that “AIDS can be transmitted by saliva.” The newsletters often advertise a book, Surviving the AIDS Plague, which makes a number of false claims about casual transmission and defends “parents who worry about sending their healthy kids to school with AIDS victims.” Blasting Israel - Kirchick will note that the newsletters are relentless in their attacks on Israel. A 1987 issue of the Investment Letter calls Israel “an aggressive, national socialist state.” A 1990 newsletter cites the “tens of thousands of well-placed friends of Israel in all countries who are willing to wok [sic] for the Mossad in their area of expertise.” Of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (see February 26, 1993), a newsletter said, “Whether it was a setup by the Israeli Mossad, as a Jewish friend of mine suspects, or was truly a retaliation by the Islamic fundamentalists, matters little.” Another newsletter column criticizing lobbyists says, “By far the most powerful lobby in Washington of the bad sort is the Israeli government” and that the goal of the “Zionist movement” is to stifle criticism. Violent Anti-Government Rhetoric - In January 1995, three months before the Oklahoma City bombing (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995), a newsletter lists “Ten Militia Commandments,” describing “the 1,500 local militias now training to defend liberty” as “one of the most encouraging developments in America.” It warns militia members that they are “possibly under BATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms] or other totalitarian federal surveillance” and prints bits of advice from the Sons of Liberty, an anti-government militia based in Alabama—among them, “You can’t kill a Hydra by cutting off its head,” “Keep the group size down,” “Keep quiet and you’re harder to find,” “Leave no clues,” “Avoid the phone as much as possible,” and “Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.” Slandering Clinton - Newsletters printed during President Clinton’s terms in office claim that Clinton uses cocaine and has fathered illegitimate children. Repeating the rumor that Clinton is a longtime cocaine user, in 1994 Paul writes that the speculation “would explain certain mysteries” about the president’s scratchy voice and insomnia. “None of this is conclusive, of course, but it sure is interesting,” he states. Distance from Newsletter - In 2008, Paul campaign spokesman Jesse Benton will attempt to distance Paul from the newsletters, saying that while Paul wrote some of their content, he often did not, and in many instances never saw the content. Benton will say that the frequent insults and vitriol directed at King are particularly surprising, because, Benton will say, “Ron thinks Martin Luther King is a hero.” In 1996, Paul claims ownership of the content, but says that Morris took the newsletter quotes “out of context” (see May 22 - October 11, 1996). In 2001, Paul will claim that he did not write any of the passages, and will claim having no knowledge of them whatsoever (see October 1, 2001). Most of the newsletters’ articles and columns contain no byline, and the Internet archives of the newsletters begin in 1999. In 2008, Kirchick will find many of the older newsletters on file at the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Kirchick will note the lack of bylines, and the general use of the first person in the material, “implying that Paul was the author.” Kirchick will conclude: “[W]hoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published under a banner containing Paul’s name, and the articles (except for one special edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another writer) seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him—and reflected his views. What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays.” Paul, Kirchick writes, is “a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.” Kirchick will conclude: “Paul’s campaign wants to depict its candidate as a naive, absentee overseer, with minimal knowledge of what his underlings were doing on his behalf. This portrayal might be more believable if extremist views had cropped up in the newsletters only sporadically—or if the newsletters had just been published for a short time. But it is difficult to imagine how Paul could allow material consistently saturated in racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy-mongering to be printed under his name for so long if he did not share these views. In that respect, whether or not Paul personally wrote the most offensive passages is almost beside the point. If he disagreed with what was being written under his name, you would think that at some point—over the course of decades—he would have done something about it.” (Kirchick 1/8/2008; Gane-McCalla 5/6/2011) In 2008, Paul will deny writing virtually any of his newsletters’ various content (see January 8-15, 2008 and January 16, 2008).

The visitors’ center at the new Branch Davidian church outside Waco, Texas. [Source: Waco Cult (.com)]Workers break ground on the Mt. Carmel property near Waco, Texas, for a new Branch Davidian church. The Davidian compound that stood there before was burned to the ground six years ago during a standoff with FBI agents (see April 19, 1993); only about 12 Davidians remain in the area. The project is led by radio talk show host Alex Jones, who says the Davidians were victims of “a government cover-up of its violation of the First Amendment.” Jones, whose radio show features radical conspiracy theories and a variety of right-wing and gun advocates as guests, says of the church raising: “This is a statement. This is about saying the witch hunt of 1993 is over.” The party of workers includes the parents of Davidian leader David Koresh, who died during the standoff. Koresh’s stepfather Roy Haldeman says of the project, “I feel good about it.” He lived at the compound during 1992 and the early months of 1993. Jones says he and others have been talking about building a structure on the site for three years. “All of it, it’s all about public opinion,” he says. “We know that now is the perfect time, that’s why we’re doing it.… This is a monument to the First Amendment. You think about speech and the press, but it is also religion and the expression thereof.” During an interview with an Associated Press reporter, he wears a pin reading, “You burn it, we build it.” Jones has contributed $1,000 to the project, and says it will be complete in two or three months. The ownership of the Mt. Carmel property is in dispute. At least four parties claim it: Clive Doyle and a group of Davidians who lived at the compound; Douglas Mitchell, who claims to be the divinely appointed leader of the Branch Davidian Seventh-day Adventist Association; Amo Bishop Roden (see May 15, 1995), who has said that she was married “by contract” to the late George Roden, the former Branch Davidian leader (see November 3, 1987 and After); and Thomas Drake, Roden’s old bodyguard. Doyle says his group has maintained the grounds, erected a memorial to the Davidians slain in the standoff, and paid the taxes on it. He says he has been leading a small number of congregants in Bible studies in the Waco area and intends to lead services at the new church. One volunteer working on the church is Mike Robbins of Austin, a customer relations manager at a car dealership. He says he is not associated with the Davidians, but has constitutional concerns about what happened at the compound: “I came out here to support the First Amendment rights and the rights of every citizen,” he says. “There is a lack of tolerance in this country and I’m here to fight that.” (Associated Press 9/19/1999; Snyder 1/20/2000; Witherspoon 5/3/2000) In November 1999, Jones is fired from his job as a host on Dallas’s KJFK-FM after refusing to stop broadcasting interviews with surviving Davidians, and for refusing to stop discussing his theories about government conspiracies surrounding the April 1993 debacle. Jones moves to a public-access cable TV channel and over the Internet. (Snyder 1/20/2000) The target date for the completion of the project is pushed back to April 19, 2000, the seven-year anniversary of the conflagration at the former compound. About $40,000 has been raised for the project, volunteers say, but $50,000 more is needed. Doyle and his mother, Edna, live on the property in a mobile home. A good number of the volunteers helping build the church are anti-government activists who share theories about the government’s secret plan to destroy the Davidians, many of which are aired and discussed on the air by Jones, who regularly features survivors of the 1993 debacle on his cable show. The Michigan Militia has donated $500, and vendors sell T-shirts emblazoned with machine guns and slogans such as “Death to the New World Order.” Construction work is only done on Sundays, in deference to the Davidians’ Saturday Sabbath. (Ross 12/22/1999; Snyder 1/20/2000) The church will be dedicated for services on April 19, 2000. The construction costs will come to at least $92,000. Some of the surviving Davidians do not want to worship at the new church, but prefer to meet in private homes. (Ross 12/22/1999; Mabin 4/19/2000) At the dedication service, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark says: “This is an occasion for joy, because from the ashes has risen the church. The world must never forget what the United States government did here.” Clark is one of several lawyers representing the surviving Davidians in a wrongful-death lawsuit against the US government (see April 1995). Five Michigan Militia members, dressed in combat fatigues and berets, will present sect members with a commemorative plaque from their group for the new building. (Hancock 4/20/2000) Doyle will eventually win a court verdict awarding him ownership of the land. (McKenna 8/11/2002)

The General Services Administration (GSA) reports that there was no truth to assertions that Clinton White House officials had vandalized the White House before departing in January 2001. Bush White House officials made those assertions in January (see January 25, 2001), claims which were picked up on and embellished by conservative talk radio hosts and other media reporters (see January 25-27, 2001 and January 26, 2001). The GSA investigated the claims at the request of House Representative Bob Barr (R-GA). Normal Wear and Tear, Pranks Found - The GSA report finds that nothing unusual had occurred during the transition from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration. “The condition of the real property was consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy,” the GSA report finds. Although some pranks were found to have taken place—“W” keys removed from computer keyboards and signs reading “Office of Strategery” placed on office doors, for example—none of the other alleged actions took place. No Evidence for Allegations of Vandalism - No computers, copiers, or telephones were destroyed; no lewd graffiti or pornographic images were pasted to walls or displayed on computer monitors. Nothing was stolen either from the White House or from Air Force One, as many reports had insisted (see February 8, 2001 and February 14, 2001). Attempt to Smear Clinton Administration? - Harvard University’s Alex Jones says: “I think it was this calculated effort to plant a damaging story. There was a sort of fertile ground for believing anything bad.” The General Accounting Office’s Bernard Unger, director for physical infrastructure, says of the GSA investigation, “They told me that there were papers that were not organized lying on the floor and on desks; there were some scratches here and there, but the bottom line was they didn’t see anything really in their view that was significant and that would appear to some as real extensive damage.” Clinton aide Mark Lindsay, who oversaw the transition between the Clinton and Bush administration, says he is pleased that the GSA has set the record straight. “Because of President Clinton, this was one of the smoothest transitions in the history of the presidency,” he says. “This was nothing more than just lies.” Conservative pundit Tony Snow, one of the harshest critics of the Clinton administration over the so-called “vandal scandal” (see January 26, 2001), says, “I’m perfectly willing to admit my error on the aircraft,” but insists that the information he disseminated about vandalism and wholesale theft at the White House was true. “What often happens in Washington is gossip becomes news,” he notes. “That’s not a good thing.” (Goldstein 5/18/2001; Marquis 5/19/2001) Former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta says: “Certainly people inside the [Bush] administration fed this story. At least they got what they wanted out of it.” (Lauerman and Montgomery 5/23/2001)

Libertarian Representative Ron Paul (R-TX—see 1978-1996, July 9-10, 2006, July 22, 2007, and August 4, 2008) gives an interview to radio host Alex Jones in which he accuses President-elect Barack Obama of working to undermine the US government in favor of a “new world order” (see September 11, 1990), a UN-led “one-world government.” Paul says that he believes the incoming Obama administration is orchestrating some sort of “international crisis” that will give Obama the chance to begin implementing his sinister plan: “I think it’s going to be an announcement of a new monetary order, and they’ll probably make it sound very limited, they’re not going to say this is world government, even though it is if you control the world’s money and you control the military, which they do indirectly.… A world central bank, worldwide regulation and world control of the whole system, of all the commodities and all the natural resources, what else can you call it other than world government?… Obama wouldn’t be there if he didn’t toe the line.… [T]his could be the beginning of the end of what’s left of our national sovereignty.” Paul says that many non-US media outlets are already hailing Obama as “the world’s leader.” (Neiwert 11/17/2008)

Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano hosts radio host Alex Jones on the online program Freedom Watch. Jones says that he has long pointed out “how hundreds of mainstream news articles a week are saying there is a new world order, a global government. It will be run by the very banks that are collapsing society by design, and we will pay carbon taxes to them.… [T]he good news is, I’ve never seen an awakening this big. And I’m seeing, you know, people like Glenn Beck talk about the new world order on Fox. I’m seeing you talk about it for years before him. We’re seeing [CNN host] Lou Dobbs talk about it. We’re seeing, you know, mainline talk show hosts—[radio host Rush] Limbaugh is even talking about global government now. [Radio host] Michael Savage is talking about how he thinks, you know, Obama may stage crises to bring in martial law.” (Media Matters 4/10/2009) Jones is echoing claims made in the ‘90s and later by extremist militia groups, which warned that the US government intended to implement a “new world order” (see September 11, 1990) of a one-world government that would result in the confiscation of Americans’ guns, and a general replacement of democracy for tyranny (see 1994, January 1994, February 1995, July 4-11, 1997, October 20, 1999, April 14-15, 2009, January 21, 2010, and October 11, 2010), and that are echoed by Fox News pundits such as Glenn Beck (see March 17, 2009), Bill O’Reilly (see April 1-2, 2009), and others (see April 6, 2009).

Within hours of Richard Poplawski’s murder of three Pittsburgh police officers (see April 4, 2009), the media learns that he is an avowed racist and white supremacist who has been preparing for a violent confrontation with authorities. Poplawski has contributed to racist Web sites, writing about his hatred of “race mixing,” the economic recession, Zionist conspiracies, and his fondness for his “AK” rifle. He also bears what one columnist will describe as a “Nazi-style tattoo,” and on Stormfront, a neo-Nazi Web site, described the tattoo as a “deliberately Americanized version of the [Nazi] iron eagle.” In a March 13 post on a racist site, he wrote: “One can read the list of significant persons in government and in major corporations and see who is pulling the strings. One can observe the policies and final products and should walk away with little doubt there is Zionist occupation and—after some further research [and] critical thinking—will discover their insidious intentions.” In the same month, Poplawski also posted that “the federal government, mainstream media, and banking system in these United States are strongly under the influence of—if not completely controlled by—Zionist interest. An economic collapse of the financial system is inevitable, bringing with it some degree of civil unrest if not outright balkanization of the continental US, civil/revolutionary/racial war.… This collapse is likely engineered by the elite Jewish powers that be in order to make for a power and asset grab.” His more recent posts, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), were escalating in their rhetorical violence, urging fellow white supremacists to achieve “ultimate victory for our people” by “taking back our nation.” He promised that he would be “ramping up the activism” soon. After the Pittsburgh Steelers won the Super Bowl in February 2009, Poplawski dismissed NFL football as what he called “negroball,” then went out, conducted surveillance of how police tried to control crowds, and posted about his findings, saying that it was a prelude to the government rounding up citizens for imprisonment in concentration camps. Most of Poplawski’s postings were on Stormfront and Infowars, a conspiracy-minded Web site hosted by radio talk show host Alex Jones. The posts began, as far as can be ascertained, in 2007 and ended a few hours before the shootings. The ADL’s Mark Pitcavage says of Poplawski’s writings: “Cumulatively, what these postings reveal is a lot more about his mindset. They show a growing anti-government and anti-police hostility.” Other postings made by Poplawski show his intense, race-based dislike of President Obama and his intention to violently resist any government attempts to take away his guns. Pitcavage notes that in the last month, Poplawski changed his online moniker from “Rich P” to “Braced for Fate.” He says of the change, “I mean, this is talking about some inevitable confrontation, and possibly a fatal confrontation.” (Hamill 4/7/2009; Anti-Defamation League 4/8/2009; Jewish Telegraphic Agency 6/12/2009) Mrs. Poplawski tells police that her son, who was discharged from the Marine Corps for assaulting his drill sergeant during basic training, had been “stockpiling guns and ammunition, buying and selling the weapons online, because he believed that as a result of the economic collapse, the police were no longer able to protect society.” (Schmitz and Balingit 4/6/2009) Poplawski and his friend Edward Perkovic collaborated on an Internet broadcast where they showed video clips and talked politics (Roddy 4/4/2009) , including a clip and subsequent discussion of a discussion on Fox News between host Glenn Beck and guest Representative Ron Paul (R-TX), which featured warnings about concentration camps run by FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Perkovic, who shares many of Poplawski’s beliefs, will say of his friend: “He was really into politics and really into the First and Second Amendment. One thing he feared was he feared the gun ban because he thought that was going to take away peoples’ right to defend themselves. He never spoke of going out to murder or to kill.” He adds: “We recently discovered that 30 states had declared sovereignty. One of his concerns was why were these major events in America not being reported to the public.” (Roddy 4/5/2009; Anti-Defamation League 4/8/2009) On his MySpace page, Perkovic has written of his admiration for a novel called The Turner Diaries, which depicts the white supremacist takeover of the US and the extermination of minorities (see 1978), and the long-debunked “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a manifesto that purports to lay out the plans of “Zionists” to take over the world. (Neiwert 4/4/2009) Perkovic has posted about the “Zionist occupied government,” “mixed bloodlines that will erase national identity,” and Jewish control of the media. (Anti-Defamation League 4/8/2009)

Rep. Louis Gohmert. [Source: Associated Press / Washington Blade]Representative Louis Gohmert (R-TX) lays out a skein of theories on radical radio host Alex Jones’s broadcast. During his interview with Jones, Gohmert accuses the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats of trying to implement socialism and kill senior citizens; Jones and Gohmert compare Obama to a number of foreign despots. Gohmert tells Jones and his listeners: “We’ve been battling this socialist health care, the nationalization of health care, that is going to absolutely kill senior citizens. They’ll put them on lists and force them to die early because they won’t get the treatment as early as they need.… I would rather stop this socialization of health care because once the government pays for your health care, they have every right to tell you what you eat, what you drink, how you exercise, where you live.… But if we’re going to pay 700 million dollars like we voted last Friday to put condoms on wild horses, and I know it just says an un-permanent enhanced contraception whatever the heck that is. I guess it follows that they’re eventually get around to doing it to us.” Gohmert is echoing claims by Republican lawmakers and industry lobbyists that the Democrats’ health care reform proposal will kill senior citizens (see November 23, 2008, January 27, 2009, February 9, 2009, February 11, 2009, February 18, 2009, May 13, 2009, June 24, 2009, June 25, 2009, July 10, 2009, July 16, 2009, July 17, 2009, July 21, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23, 2009, and July 23-24, 2009). Jones ups the ante by accusing the White House “science czar” of planning to “put… stuff in the water to sterilize us,” and then goes on to accuse the White House of, among other things, implementing a “eugenics control grid over us” and implementing “youth brigades, national service compulsory in a group outside the military under the Democratic Party control in the city year in the red and black uniforms.” Gohmert agrees with Jones, and says these kinds of policies were “done in the 1930s,” a plain reference to Nazi Germany, “and it’s not the only place its been done. It has been done throughout history.” Jones says, “Mao did it,” referring to Communist China’s Mao Zedong. Gohmert agrees: “Well, that’s exactly what I was thinking of. This is the kind of the thing we got to stop. We got to get back to the roots, the basics.” Gohmert praises Jones for his rhetoric and accusations: “That shows how on top of things you are, Alex.” For his part, Jones effusively thanks Gohmert and reminds him that “you’re there fighting and we’re supporting you.” (Fang 7/27/2009) Progressive MSNBC host Rachel Maddow says of Gohmert and Jones: “You know, the Democrats may be fighting it out about whether they’re going to be beholden to the insurance companies and whether there’s going to be a public option in health care reform. But when it comes to the Republicans, this is the kind of thing they are bringing to the table: Hitler, Mao, and secret plots to kill old people.” (MSNBC 7/29/2009)

Conservative author Jonathan Kay covers the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tennessee (see February 4-6, 2010), and publishes a column that states: “[I]t has become clear to me that the movement is dominated by people whose vision of the government is conspiratorial and dangerously detached from reality. It’s more John Birch than John Adams.” Kay, who is writing a book on alternative theories about the 9/11 attacks, is astonished at the breadth and depth of the conspiracy theories that many tea parties, and tea party organizations, seem to embrace. The “villain list,” as Kay calls it, includes banks; bailed-out corporations; Republican Party leaders such as RNC chairman Michael Steele, whom they feel ignore the tea parties; colleges and universities; CNN’s Anderson Cooper; Fox News pundits like Bill O’Reilly who scorn them; “big media” outlets such as the Washington Post; and even moviemakers like James Cameron, who make movies that they feel contain “hidden messages” to fool Americans into supporting gay rights, cuts in military spending, and the like. The central figure in their net of conspiracy theories, Kay writes, is Barack Obama (see May 7, 2010). The convention is opened by anti-environmentalist Steve Malloy, who accuses Obama and his administration of working to control every aspect of Americans’ lives, from the colors of their cars to the temperatures to which they set their home heating units, all to comply with what Malloy says is the United Nations’s greenhouse gas-reduction program. According to Malloy: “Obama isn’t a US socialist. He’s an international socialist. He envisions a one-world government.” Kay is particularly concerned that, based on what he hears at the convention, the tea parties are affiliating themselves with far-right, white supremacist ideology such as that espoused by the John Birch Society (see March 10, 1961 and December 2011). They seem particularly enamored of the “New World Order” conspiracy (see September 11, 1990, November 5, 2008, March 17, 2009, March 18, 2009, March 24, 2009, March 24, 2009, and April 6, 2009). A convention speaker, former judge Roy Moore, tells his listeners that Obama intends to station “a UN guard in every house[hold].” Radio host Alex Jones is a favorite among tea partiers, Kay writes; Jones claims that Obama’s presidency is a plot by the leaders of the New World Order to “con the Amercican people into accepting global slavery.” One conventioneer tells Kay that Washington liberals “engineered the financial crash so they could destroy the value of the US dollar, pay off America’s debts with worthless paper, and then create a new currency called the Amero that would be used in a newly created ‘North American Currency Union’ with Canada and Mexico.” Shortly thereafter, the convention shows a “documentary” entitled Generation Zero that makes similar claims. The claims that Obama is a Kenyan who is ineligible to be president is a favorite theory, Kay writes; WorldNetDaily publisher Joseph Farah (see August 1, 2008 and After, December 5, 2008, May 28, 2009, July 21, 2009, and August 1-4, 2009) tells the crowd that the circumstances of Obama’s birth are more mysterious than the birth of Jesus Christ, and says, “My dream is that if Barack Obama seeks reelection in 2012 that he won’t be able to go to any city, any city, any town in America without seeing signs that ask, ‘Where’s the birth certificate?’” (see May 18, 2009). Kay concludes: “Perhaps the most distressing part of all is that few media observers bothered to catalog these bizarre, conspiracist outbursts, and instead fixated on Sarah Palin’s Saturday night keynote address. It is as if, in the current overheated political atmosphere, we all simply have come to expect that radicalized conservatives will behave like unhinged paranoiacs when they collect in the same room. That doesn’t say much for the state of the right in America. The tea partiers’ tricornered hat is supposed to be a symbol of patriotism and constitutional first principles. But when you take a closer look, all you find is a helmet made of tin foil.” (National Tea Party Convention 2/2010; Kay 2/8/2010)

Private Lee Pray, a member of the Oath Keepers. His finger tattoo spells out ‘THOR.’ [Source: Mother Jones]The progressive news magazine Mother Jones publishes a detailed examination of the Oath Keepers (see March 9, 2009), one of the fastest-growing “patriot” groups on the far right. The group was founded in April 2009 by Stewart Rhodes, a lawyer who once served as an aide to libertarian US Representative Ron Paul (R-TX). According to author Justine Sharrock, it has become “a hub in the sprawling anti-Obama movement that includes Tea Partiers, Birthers, and 912ers.” (Sharrock is referring to the burgeoning “tea party” movement, the people who believe President Obama is not an American citizen (see August 1, 2008 and After and October 8-10, 2008), and the “9/12” organization formed by lobbying organization FreedomWorks and Fox News host Glenn Beck—see March 13, 2009 and After.) Beck, MSNBC commentator Pat Buchanan (see May 28, 2009, June 20, 2009, and July 16, 2009), and CNN host Lou Dobbs have publicly praised the organization. In December 2009, a grassroots summit organized by the Oath Keepers drew lawmakers such as US Representatives Phil Gingrey (R-GA) and Paul Broun (R-GA). Sharrock’s profile is based on research and interviews with Rhodes, other Oath Keeper leaders, and ordinary members such as Private Lee Pray, who is stationed at Fort Drum, New York. Group Made Up of Uniformed Citizens - What sets the group apart from others on the far-right fringe is that its membership is restricted to US citizens in uniform—soldiers, police officers, and veterans. At its ceremonies, members reaffirm their official oaths of service, pledging to protect the Constitution, but then go a step further, vowing to disobey “unconstitutional” orders from what they view as an increasingly tyrannical government. Pray says he knows of five fellow Oath Keepers at Fort Drum. Preparing for Tyranny, Martial Law - He and other members are actively recruiting, arguing that under Obama, the US government is turning increasingly tyrannical and must be opposed, violently if need be. Pray says that many Oath Keepers had problems with some government policies under President Bush, but those reservations have grown with Obama’s ascension to power. Rhodes tells Sharrock: “Too many conservatives relied on Bush’s character and didn’t pay attention. Only now, with Obama, do they worry and see what has been done. Maybe you said, ‘I trusted Bush to only go after the terrorists.’ But what do you think can happen down the road when they say, ‘I think you are a threat to the nation?’” Pray, like many members, believes it will be a year at most before Obama declares martial law, perhaps under the pretext of a natural disaster or another 9/11-level terror attack, and begin detaining citizens en masse and banning interstate travel. Another Oath Keeper advises Sharrock to prepare a “bug out” bag with 39 items including gas masks, ammunition, and water purification tablets, so that she will be prepared “when the sh_t hits the fan.” Pray and his friends have a “fortified bunker” at one of their member’s parents’ home in rural Idaho, where they have stashed survival gear, generators, food, and plenty of weapons. If need be, they say, they will attack their fellow soldiers. Pray describes himself as both a “birther” and a “truther,” believing that Obama is an illegitimate president installed by a government that launched the 9/11 attacks on its own soil to drive the country further down the road towards tyranny. Pray has suffered demotion for a drinking problem, and was denied deployment to Iraq when he injured his knees in a fall. Right now his job involves operating and maintaining heavy equipment on base, and he is listed currently as “undeployable.” He and his fellow Oath Keepers on base spend their free time researching what they call the “New World Order” (see September 11, 1990) and conspiracies about detention camps. Pray is one of the few active-duty members who will agree to have his name made public; Rhodes encourages active-duty soldiers and police officers to hide their membership in the group, saying a group with large numbers of anonymous members can instill in its adversaries the fear of the unknown—a “great force multiplier,” he calls it. Pray worries that the CIA is monitoring his phone calls and insists that unmarked black cars follow him when he drives. A fellow Fort Drum Oath Keeper who only allows his first name of Brandon to be used, and who is also “undeployable” due to his own injuries, says that the off-limits areas of Fort Drum contain concentration camps. Sharrock notes that the soldiers’ behavior might be considered “paranoid,” but writes, “Then again, when you’re an active-duty soldier contemplating treason, some level of paranoia is probably sensible.” Stewart Rhodes - Rhodes, a Yale graduate and constitutional lawyer, is working on a book currently titled We the Enemy: How Applying the Laws of War to the American People in the War on Terror Threatens to Destroy Our Constitutional Republic. He is an Army veteran who was honorably discharged after injuring his spine in a parachute jump, and worked for a time supervising interns in Ron Paul’s Congressional office. He briefly practiced law in Montana, has worked as a sculptor and a firearms instructor, and writes a gun-rights column for SWAT magazine. He describes himself as a libertarian, a staunch constitutionalist, and a devout Christian. He decided to abandon electoral politics in 2008 after Paul’s presidential bid failed, and turned instead to grassroots organizing. In college, he became fascinated with the idea that had German soldiers and police refused to follow orders in the 1930s, Adolf Hitler could have been stopped. In early 2008, he read a letter in SWAT magazine declaring that “the Constitution and our Bill of Rights are gravely endangered” and that service members, veterans, and police “is where they will be saved, if they are to be saved at all!” Rhodes responded with a column predicting a future President Hillary (“Hitlery”) Clinton turning the US into a despotism while dressed in her “Chairman Mao signature pantsuit.” He asked readers if they intended to follow this “dominatrix-in-chief,” hold militia members as enemy combatants, disarm citizens, and shoot all resisters. If “a police state comes to America, it will ultimately be by your hands,” he wrote. You had better “resolve to not let it happen on your watch.” Shortly thereafter, he set up a blog he called “Oath Keepers,” asking for testimonials from soldiers and veterans, and began gaining popularity. Military officers offered assistance. A Marine Corps veteran invited Rhodes to speak at a local tea party event. Paul campaigners provided strategic advice. In March 2009, Rhodes attended a rally staged by a pro-militia group, and in front of the crowd of some 400 participants, officially launched the Oath Keepers movement (see March 9, 2009). Buchanan and Beck have praised Rhodes, with Buchanan predicting that he “is headed for cable stardom.” Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of Infowars.com has repeatedly featured Rhodes and the Oath Keepers on his radio talk show. Attracts Attention of Anti-Hate Organizations - The Oath Keepers has come to the attention of anti-hate organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which have cited the group in their reports on rising anti-government extremism. Rhodes has accused the SPLC of trying “to lump us in with white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and of course make the insinuation that we’re the next McVeigh,” referring to Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995). Author David Neiwert, an expert on right-wing groups, tells Sharrock that it would be a mistake to term them another amalgamation of “right-wing crackpots” or “extremist nimrods,” as other press outlets have done. “[T]he reality is a lot of them are fairly intelligent, well-educated people who have complex worldviews that are thoroughly thought out,” Neiwert says. Neiwert and Sharrock tie Rhodes’s message to the much earlier views expressed by members of the now-defunct Posse Comitatus (see 1969), and note that the last reemergence of this brand of rhetoric took place during the last time a Democrat, Bill Clinton, was in the White House. Today, groups like the Oath Keepers use the Internet, particularly Facebook and YouTube, and cable news networks, to connect with like-minded citizens around the world. “The underlying sentiment is an attack on government dating back to the New Deal and before,” Neiwert says. “Ron Paul has been a significant conduit in recent years, but nothing like Glenn Beck and Michele Bachmann [R-MN] and Sarah Palin (see October 10, 2008)—all of whom share that innate animus.” While Rhodes and most Oath Keepers say they will only begin active disobedience under the delineated circumstances laid out by the group, some members have gone down their own paths of violence. Oath Keeper Daniel Knight Hayden set off a controversy last April 15 with a barrage of messages on Twitter stating his intention to “START THE KILLING NOW!” by engaging in a gun battle at the Oklahoma State Capitol and urging other Oath Keepers to join him (see April 14-15, 2009). Rhodes denounced Hayden, but Neiwert notes that Rhodes’s inflammatory and inciteful rhetoric can have what he calls “an unhinging effect” on people inclined toward violent action. “It puts them in a state of mind of fearfulness and paranoia, creating so much anger and hatred that eventually that stuff boils over.” In January, ex-Marine and Oath Keeper spokesman Charles Dyer, who beat a treason charge for advocating armed resistance to the government, was arrested on charges of raping a 7-year-old girl, and authorities found stolen military weaponry at his home; some militia groups have hailed Dyer as “the first POW of the second American Revolution,” but Rhodes removed information about him from the organization’s Web sites and now denies he was ever a member (see January 21, 2010). Rhodes says he and his Web staff are “overwhelmed” with the need to delete messages encouraging racism and violence from their blog, and recently he shut down one Internet forum because of members’ attempts to use it to recruit for militia organizations. Chip Berlet of the watchdog group Political Research Associates and an expert on far-right movements equates Rhodes’s rhetoric to yelling fire in a crowded theater. “Promoting these conspiracy theories is very dangerous right now because there are people who will assume that a hero will stop at nothing.” What will happen, he adds, “is not just disobeying orders but harming and killing.” Rhodes acknowledges that to follow through on his rhetoric could be risky, and reminds Sharrock that freedom “is not neat or tidy, it’s messy.” Gold Standards, Muslim Rights, and Treasonous Federal Institutions - During a recent meeting at a North Las Vegas casino, Sharrock took part in discussions of whether Muslim citizens had rights under the Constitution, why the Federal Reserve was a treasonous institution, why the government should be run under Biblical law and a gold standard, and how abortion-rights advocates are part of a eugenics plan targeting Christians. The group takes no official stance on the US’s war on terror or its foreign engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, but a recent Oath Keeper member who promoted his dual membership in the Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) on the Oath Keepers blog had his post removed by Rhodes, who called the IVAW a “totalitarian” and “communist” organization. Expanding Membership - Rhodes says the group has at least one chapter in each of the 50 states, and claims the group has some 29,000 members, not counting the ones who keep their membership off the computer lists. Volunteers are preparing a large “outreach” to soldiers serving overseas. The organization has worked hard to become a staple of tea party events, and tells tea partiers that bringing guns to those events reminds participants of their constitutional rights. The organization has made strong connections with groups such as the Constitution Party and Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, and national figures such as Ralph Reed, the former director of Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, and Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America. Elected officials such as Broun, Gingrey, Bachmann, and Steve King (R-IA) have expressed their interest in sponsoring legislation crafted by Oath Keeper leaders. (Sharrock 3/2010)

Glenn Beck discusses the Tides Foundation during his Fox News broadcast. [Source: NewsRealBlog (.com)]Journalist John Hamilton publishes the results of a series of interviews with Byron Williams, who is charged with multiple counts of attempting to murder police officers from a shootout with Oakland, California, Highway Patrol officers (see July 18, 2010 and After). Williams has said that he targeted a progressive charitable foundation in San Francisco, the Tides Foundation, because of its liberal policies, and has said he intended to “start a revolution by traveling to San Francisco and killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU.” Since his arrest, Williams has retained Hamilton to be his “media advocate.” Williams and Fox's Beck - Williams told Hamilton that his primary political influence and informational source is Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck. Williams had Hamilton watch specific broadcasts of Beck’s shows to glean information about what Williams describes as an intricate conspiracy between President Obama, liberal philanthropist George Soros (see August 8, 2006 and February 2007), Brazilian oil company Petrobras, and BP, the corporation responsible for triggering the Gulf oil disaster. Williams also cites right-wing pundit David Horowitz (see August 5, 2003 and November 30, 2004) and right-wing conspiracist Alex Jones (see July 24, 2009) as other influences. The progressive media watchdog organization Media Matters notes that Beck spoke 29 times about the Tides Foundation in the 18 months leading up to Williams’s shooting spree, sometimes at length; other pundits rarely mentioned the organization, if at all, during that same time period. Williams defends Beck, saying that the talk show host advocates non-violence and merely “confirm[ed]” his belief in the conspiracy. “Beck would never say anything about a conspiracy, would never advocate violence,” Williams told Hamilton. “He’ll never do anything… of this nature. But he’ll give you every ounce of evidence that you could possibly need.” Beck, he says, is “like a schoolteacher on TV. You need to go back to June—June of this year, 2010—and look at all his programs from June, and you’ll see he’s been breaking open some of the most hideous corruption.” In that month, Beck advised his viewers to stop a Democratic-orchestrated “march towards Communism” by “shoot[ing]” Democrats such as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) “in the head (see June 9, 2010). Genesis of a Shootout - Williams moved to his childhood home in Groveland, California, in 2007 after serving a prison sentence for a 2001 bank robbery. Williams has an extensive criminal record, and has been convicted of assault, property destruction, hit-and-run, and drunken driving. He lived with his mother during that time, unable to find steady work, and growing increasingly depressed and fascinated with right-wing radio and television. His neighbor, Tom Funk, told Hamilton of Williams’s profanity-laden tirade on the night of November 4, 2008, after Obama won the presidency. He remembered Williams shouting what he calls racist, drunken threats after the news of Obama’s victory was announced, saying: “He was up there cussing and saying that America is not going right by having a black president. He was using words he shouldn’t be saying after 9/11, because it would have put him in jail. Threatening words towards the president.” In the days before and after the election, Funk said, Williams liked to listen to radio talk show host Michael Savage (see January 10, 2008, March 13, 2008, and November 10, 2008). Hamilton found transcripts of Savage’s radio broadcasts during that time; Savage held forth about the “bloodbath coming to America” should Obama be elected, and predicted that the nation was on “the verge of a Marxist revolution in the United States of America. You have a naked Marxist, America-hating, white-hating [Democratic] party—wing of the party—about to seize power. And you don’t even know it.” Hamilton then interviewed Williams’s mother Janice, who drives an SUV with “Palin 2012” bumperstickers on it. Williams’s mother told Hamilton that in phone calls and a letter to her, her son “basically said: ‘I’m sorry, I never intended to hurt anyone. I got really angry and lost my head.’” She said she did not believe her son would actually have attacked either the ACLU or the Tides Foundation. She also denied that her son shouted racial imprecations after Obama’s election, saying: “I read one account that he used the n-word. I don’t believe that. The neighbors told that to the media, but they just wove that out of whole cloth. I don’t care how loud anyone here gets, there’s no way anyone over there could have heard anything that far away. It’s just someone seeking publicity.” She said her son does not tolerate alcohol well, because he is partly “American Indian… [t]hat’s why he can’t drink.” The day of the shooting, she “found 18 or 20 beer bottles by the sink.” Her son is angry, she told Hamilton, because of “the federal government. And the shadow government that operates behind the scenes, manipulating things.” She said she agreed with many of her son’s concerns about government intrusion: “I believe in limited government. The government should be there solely for the purpose of protecting our borders. All the other stuff is add-ons. This whole Obamacare thing has everything to do with consolidating government. There’s no concern about the little people. Having said that, my hope was to retake the country peacefully, through the ballot box.” She denied that her son was influenced by Beck, Savage, or any other right-wing commentator, saying: “All the reporters who came out here last month were blaming what he did on Rush [Limbaugh], Glenn Beck, and the tea party. Why would you blame the messenger? If Glenn Beck tells us something, and everyone gets upset about it, why blame him?” She called the Tides Foundation “a money laundering scheme for the radical left that didn’t want their names attributed to what they were doing,” a charge first leveled by Beck. She did confirm that her son was a Beck fan: “Yes, he liked Glenn Beck, but he didn’t feel he went far enough. He’d take it only so far, but stopped short.” She added that almost everyone she had heard from after the shooting supported her son’s position: “I had only one hate call out of all the thousands of people who heard about this case. Most people have expressed support—not for the act, but for the frustration behind it.” Jailhouse Meetings - Hamilton talked to Williams in the visiting area of the Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, California, twice over a period of two weeks. Williams told Hamilton that he worried about being portrayed as an “extremist,” and said he should probably not discuss “that incident”—the shooting—because of his pending criminal trial. Williams was loquacious about his political views; he said, “My big thing was the oil rig, the Deepwater Horizon,” referring to the immense BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. “I’ve uncovered enough evidence to—I think in a court of law it could bring [BP CEO] Tony Hayward, Barack Obama, George Soros, and members of Halliburton indicted for treason.” Williams believes that the oil spill was deliberate, plotted by Soros. “It was a sabotage,” Williams explained. “Hayward and [Wall Street financial firm] Goldman Sachs sold their stock, which was depreciating, two weeks before the spill. Soros invested $1 billion of his own money into Petrobras. Soros has the Tides Foundation and the Tides fund. He funnels billions of donated dollars into the fund, which he uses for all kinds of nefarious activities.… Obama sent 2 billion of taxpayer dollars to Petrobras for deep water oil exploration, while holding a moratorium on deepwater exploration in the US. Once you see this pattern—it’s fishy stuff.… Halliburton, whose job was to seal the well—two days before the explosion, they bought an oil spill clean-up company.… When I saw the news was dropping the issue like a hot potato, I became infuriated.” He concluded: “The bottom line is that George Soros is the financier of Obama. And Obama has a clear agenda: First he did the health care reform. After that, it was all about energy. He wants to impose the worst tax ever conceived: a cap-and-trade system on carbon emissions. Think of it. Even your breathing could be taxed, because you give off greenhouse gases. That’s why I did what I did. There are not a lot of people fighting back. I don’t see a response.” Williams evoked the Civil War by asking why Gulf Coast residents did not rise up in arms about what he says was a conspiracy to destroy their shoreline for Soros’s profit. “What ever happened to the spirit of the South, of the Confederacy in the Civil War?” Williams summed up the plot as he sees it: “What I see here is a plan to bring the country down.” Sources of Information - Asked where he gets his information, Williams responded: “Alex Jones. PrisonPlanet.com is his Web site. Also, DiscoverTheNetworks.” Hamilton identifies Williams’s sources: “Jones is a conspiracist and repeat Fox News guest who mingles dire warnings of the ‘New World Order’ (see September 11, 1990) with stories of government complicity in the 9/11 attacks. DiscoverTheNetworks is a Web site claiming to track ‘the individuals and organizations that make up the left.’ It’s run by David Horowitz, a former leftist who has reinvented himself as a right-wing propagandist.” Williams then named Beck as another major source of his information and said Beck is “like a schoolteacher” who uses his chalkboard to great effect. “I collect information on corruption,” Williams said. “I’ve been at it for some time.… Our media accepts the false reports and downplays the conspiracy theories.… A public that is aware of corruption can oppose the corruption. A public kept in the dark simply passes it by.” Fox News, Williams said, is the only television news outlet that is not “censored,” he said. “So perhaps Fox has broken away from the mold.” Aside from its presumably independent status, Williams added: “There’s only one conservative channel. That’s Fox. All the other ones are all liberal channels.” Williams stated that he watched Fox because of Beck, and not vice versa: “I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasn’t for the fact that Beck was on there. And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind. I said, well, nobody does this.” Williams told Hamilton to “go back to June—June of this year, 2010—and look at all his programs from June. And you’ll see he’s been breaking open some of the most hideous corruption. A year ago, I was watching him, and it was OK, he was all right, you know?… But now he’s getting it.” Williams said that he believes Beck knows more than he is willing to tell. Referring to the Gulf Oil spill, Williams said: “This is what he won’t do, Beck will not say it was a contracted hit. But he’ll give you every ounce of evidence you can possibly need to make that assumption yourself.… You see what I mean?… That’s why he downplays the 9/11 truthers. He talks bad about them.” Williams then retold some conspiracy theories that he apparently believes that Beck seems to dismiss, including the Alex Jones-propagated idea that the US government was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Of his various conspiratorial beliefs, he advised Hamilton: “Think like a conspiracy theorist. Except don’t use the word ‘theory.’ Because the conspiracies are not theories. The official report is the lie; the conspiracy is the truth.” Beck’s mission, Williams said, is to “expose” progressives and “leftists” who are endangering American democracy. Ties to Tides - Beck is the source from which Williams first learned about the Tides Foundation, which he believes is at the heart of the Soros/Obama plan to destroy America. Beck himself has said of the Tides: “The chalkboard was brought up… for the Tides Foundation. I think that might have been the first time we used it.” His efforts to “expose” Tides “was the first time that I really realized its success—Tides Foundation and ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). Because you can map it all out. And I know that they make fun of me for it, but that’s—that’s the difference.… Tides was one of the hardest things that we ever tried to explain. And everyone told us that we couldn’t. It is the reason why the blackboard really became what the blackboard is. It is because I was trying to explain Tides and how all of this worked.” Beck has repeatedly, and falsely, labeled the organization as “George Soros’ Tides Foundation,” which he has suggested is part of a liberal plot to “create mass organizations to seize power.” Tides, he said, is a “shady organization” that funnels money to “some of the most extreme groups on the left.” Beck has asserted that Tides is “involved in some of the nastiest of the nasty.” In the 18 months preceding Williams’s shooting spree, Beck attacked Tides 29 times on his Fox show. (Hamilton 10/11/2010)

Less than two hours after President Obama releases his “long form” birth certificate (see April 27, 2011) and posts a PDF (Portable Data File) copy on the Internet, Bryan Michael Nixon, an art director with an Atlanta advertising firm, makes a blog post about his initial examination of the PDF copy. Nixon says that after opening the file in the Adobe graphics program Illustrator, it is clear that the document is composed of “multiple elements.” He writes, “This in no way proves that anything on it is fake… [h]ow to interpret that is up to the viewer.” He opens his blog post with a capitalized declaration, “I AM NOT A BIRTHER!” (Bryan Keith Nixon 4/27/2011) By the afternoon, Nixon’s post is a front-page headline on the conservative news and gossip Web site Drudge Report, sparks a storm of claims and counterclaims about the document’s authenticity, and is quickly picked up by radio host Alex Jones and a plethora of Web sites. The claims that the certificate is “fake” are based in part on Nixon’s observation that the PDF file contains “multiple elements,” or “layers,” particularly two separate “layers” of background image and foreground text. Within minutes of the Nixon post, a forum participant at the Free Republic, a conservative blog and message board, writes: “No, I am analyzing an eloctronice [sic] document and saying that there is no way that this was a scanned image [sic] It was made of LAYERS in software [sic]” Another poster writes: “I opened it in Photoshop Elements and saw those white areas behind the text. YES! That image was built up, not scanned from a document.” The claim that the “layers” “prove” the certificate is fake is based on what experts call a fundamental lack of understanding of how PDF files work. Many PDFs, including the Obama certificate image, use optical character recognition (OCR) to recognize and reproduce lettering, and place those letters into a separate image. Reporter Benjy Sarlin will write, “This explains why you’re able to highlight and copy raw text from some PDF files even though it’s actually not a word processing document.” Shortly after Drudge headlines Nixon’s blog post, the National Review, inundated with emails about the “layer” theory, issues a comprehensive debunking of the “fraud” claim. “We looked into it and dismissed it,” reporter Nathan Goulding writes. Goulding uses a scanned copy of his magazine’s cover to make a PDF file, and, opening the file in Adobe Illustrator, shows that the PDF scan contains multiple layers. He writes of the layers: “Quite simply, they look like they were created programmatically, not by a human. What’s plausible is that somewhere along the way—from the scanning device to the PDF-creation software, both of which can perform OCR (optical character recognition)—these partial/pseudo-text images were created and saved. What’s not plausible is that the government spent all this time manufacturing Obama’s birth certificate only to commit the laughably rookie mistake of exporting the layers from Photoshop, or whatever photo editing software they are meant to have used. It’s likely that whoever scanned the birth certificate in Hawaii forgot to turn off the OCR setting on the scanner. Let’s leave it at that.” Sarlin writes: “The fringe theory’s rapid spread within hours of the certificate’s release presents almost a perfect example of one of the White House’s justifications for taking on the birther issue—namely, that thanks to the Internet, conspiracy theories can migrate quickly from the fringe and into the mainstream if left unchecked. In this case, it took only hours.” He concludes, “[B]irthers have wasted no time in promoting alternate theories undermining the president’s legitimacy since the release of the long form birth certificate.” (Free Republic (.com) 4/27/2011; Goulding 4/27/2011; Sarlin 4/29/2011) Two days later, an Adobe Illustrator expert proclaims the certificate genuine (see April 29, 2011).

Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez. [Source: Washington Post]Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, a young Idaho man who reportedly has an “obsession” with President Obama, fires nine shots at the White House. One of his shots strikes the window of the mansion’s living quarters, but does not break the ballistic glass. Obama and his wife Michelle are on a nine-day Asia-Pacific tour. According to an FBI affidavit, Ortega drives his black 1998 Honda to a location near 17th Street and Constitution Avenue NW, and fires twice through his passenger window, using a Romanian-made Cugir SA semiautomatic rifle equipped with a telescopic sight. Two motorists witness the shooting. FBI agents search the area around the White House and locate “several confirmed bullet impact points on the south side of the building on or above the second story,” where the First Family’s residential area is located. Officials soon find the Honda abandoned, with the Cugir and boxes of ammunition inside, along with an aluminum baseball bat and a set of brass knuckles. Days later, Pennsylvania law enforcement officials arrest Ortega at an Indiana, Pennsylvania, hotel, after a desk clerk recognizes his photograph from a Secret Service handout. Ortega does not resist arrest, according to a Pennsylvania state trooper. According to the US Park Police, Ortega has known mental health issues, and the Park Police says “Ortega should be considered unstable with violent tendencies.” Apparently Ortega considers Obama “the devil” and “the anti-Christ,” officials say. Authorities say Ortega may believe his attack is part of some divinely inspired mission. Ortega’s family reported him missing on October 31; he was stopped by police in Arlington, Virginia, on the morning of November 11 after the police received reports of a suspicious person, but released because he had apparently committed no crimes. Photographs taken of Ortega during that encounter are later identified as being those of the possible White House shooter. FBI agent Chris Ormerod later discovers that before Ortega left Idaho, he told acquaintances that he “needed to kill” Obama and that he “will not stop until it’s done.” One acquaintance later tells the FBI that Ortega believes the government is “conspiring” against him. He is charged with an attempt to assassinate Obama. Initial media reports deny that Ortega has any connections with radical groups of any kind. (Associated Press 11/16/2011; Washington Post 11/17/2011; Savage 11/17/2011; US District Court for the District of Columbia 11/17/2011 ) However, later media investigations will find those reports somewhat superficial, though no official membership in any such groups seems to exist. Ortega is apparently a religious extremist who has embraced a number of “oddball” conspiracy theories, and recently viewed a conspiracy-theory film by Alex Jones, the far-right Internet talk show host. The film Ortega watched is entitled The Obama Deception. Ortega recently posted a YouTube video asking talk show host Oprah Winfrey to allow him to appear on her program because he is the second coming of Jesus Christ. “You see, Oprah, there is still so much more that God needs me to express to the world,” he says on the video. “It’s not just a coincidence that I look like Jesus. I am the modern-day Jesus Christ that you all have been waiting for.” Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, a mental health expert, believes that Ortega may suffer from schizophrenia. “I can guarantee you that in his mind, it all makes perfect sense,” Torrey tells a reporter. “If he’s Christ, Obama’s the Antichrist.” (Yardley 11/21/2011) Ortega’s mother later denies press reports that her son has any mental issues. (Bonner and Gresko 11/18/2011)